Mattel has a new kid-focused smart hub called Aristotle, which can switch on a night light if it hears a baby crying to soothe the child (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The device is also designed to keep changing its activities, even to the point where it can help a preteen with homework, learning about the child along the way.

I think it is important to note that this is saying that the device will be being constantly upgraded as AI advances. AI is advancing at such a fast pace that by the time your baby is a teen AI will probalby be able to pass as a human assistant....or a friend....maybe even a trusted friend...maybe it will be more trusted than you. So here you have not only the beginning of a care giving AI for infants but also the ground work for a constantly evolving AI "friend" which will acompany you child throughout its life. Will it advise your child about morality? Will it exert influences on who is chosen as a life partner? And if so then who will program this morality and all the other intimate advise?

Some people are already thinking it should be banned. You won't even have to wait for the 2020 election cycle to fire up (probably pretty soon anyway) as this is something you might want to check in on with your present gov'tal representatives as well aspiring candidates. Maybe the future is here already.
chownah

People are getting really smug because latest poles show that only 32% of voters presently support trump BUT I think they must have forgotten that only 26% of voters is how many voted for him in the national election. If that 32% of voters vote for him in 2020 then it looks like he is a shoe-in to be elected again.
chownah

Do you think that this might have an impact on society? Do you think that we should consider what this might mean for the future?.....or should we just ignore it and hope for the best to only one day wake up to....to what?
chownah

More news on the AI front.
The people at google's AI research dept. have developed a new computer called Alphazero. It is a descendant of the compter program which consistently beat the worlds best Go players.

It is extremely important to note the improvement: Alphazero is not programmed to play any game. It was programmed to take rules for play...any rules at all...and then to play games against itself to learn how to play the game. It had been noted with the Go computer that humans had to teach the computer how to play so you could really think of it being human intelligence being transfered to a computer.....but with alphago there is no human training....alphago teaches itself how to play.

The results:

After eight hours of self-play, the program bested the AI that first beat the human world Go champion; and after four hours of training, it beat the current world champion chess-playing program, Stockfish. Then for a victory lap, it trained for just two hours and polished off one of the world's best shogi-playing programs named Elmo (shogi being a Japanese version of chess that's played on a bigger board).

What many people might not see at first is that this kind of ability is not restricted to games. Any problem or situation which can be defined in terms of rules of interaction and outcomes could be addressed with this approach. This could be applied to everything from dating to warfare to politics to industrial processes to infrastructure development.

I think that this will have a big impact on society, politics, etc. Do you think it is trivial? Do you think "well that's pretty good but if this is the pinnacle of AI then I"m not concerned"........news for you: this is not the piccacle.....this is only the beginning....the very beginning. It took decades to develop the computers which could win at chess and Go and which required huge human inputs for programming in order to be able to win.... Now one team of researchers in a year or two have developed a computer which is better than those and which can teach itself to be better than those starting with no knowldege except for the rules to be better in a matter of hours.

This is massive.

Maybe it would be good to start thinking about this and what all it implies....maybe you should try to get your representative (or would be representative) to start thinking about this and sharing their ideas with you......or maybe it would be better to just ignore it and wait for the disruption so that you can complain about it then.
chownah
I forgot to mention that this computer is (I'm pretty sure although I haven't verified this) is a silicon based digital computer...a very powerful one of course....but do be informed that researchers developing quantum computers are on the verge of creating practical usable quantum computers. In these computers the number of qubits is an indication of their power. Two years ago or so the number of qubits they could assemble was so low that regular silicon based digital computers existed which were way more powerful (the quantum computers were not practical for anything)....but now the number of qubits about at the level where quantum computers as powerful as the most powerful digital computers are possible.....AND....the important thing is that there is no indication that the number of qubits is limited to present abilities. Every indication is that soon there will be quantum computer (soon meaning years, not decades) that are 1000 times more powerful OR MORE....
So........match up the advances in AI as described above with computers that are several orders of magnitude more powerful.....and Putin's claim that whoever masters AI first will control the world (or something similar I'm not sure exactly his words).....don't you think it would be good to give these issues a bit more consideration?
chownah

we must break definitively both with neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have lately supported it—casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism. Only by joining a robustly egalitarian politics of distribution to a substantively inclusive, class-sensitive politics of recognition can we build a counterhegemonic bloc that could lead us beyond the current crisis to a better world

There's definitely a lot of flowery and cerebral language in the piece, but at the same time the author makes good use of them in getting her points across. The conclusion makes good sense in the context of the rest of the article where most of the terms there are defined and fleshed out. By itself, it sounds weird for sure.